George Saunders keeps showing up here, and I know I’m supposed to be reading everybody. Not supposed to get stuck on just one writer. But oh, this one. And this particular story. I’m learning to much about writing in general, but specifically short story writing from this man. This one, Sticks, is only 392 words long, and it packs an entire family’s life into those words, through describing a father’s obsession with “a sort of crucifix he’d built out of metal pole in the yard.”

We follow the family’s history through the father’s dressing up of the pole (Santa at Christmas, a jersey during Super Bowl, Uncle Sam during July 4th, etc. The father seems just a few degrees off mentally. The mother dies, and we watch grief play out in how the costumes for the pole change, becoming more unhinged and, strangely, more more present, more human—full of grief, and love, and the desire for forgiveness. It’s humbling to experience how much can be said with so few words.

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Essay: “The Men Who Don’t Want Women to Vote. Or Work. Or Have Opinions,” by Helen Lewis, from the Jun 2026 issue of The Atlantic

I’ve heard that misogyny is on the rise right now, but I had no idea what this really meant. The scariest part about this excellent article by Helen Lewis is the direct quotes from men who are speaking them out loud, in public, to whole crowds who agree in a kind of rabid, hell yeah! way.
1. From a Young Republicans group chat:
“If your pilot is a she and she looks ten shades darker than someone from Sicily, just end it there. Scream the no no word,”
2. From Nick Fuentes, a self-professed Christian Nationalist who leads a loose collection of trolls known as Groypers: “Just like Hitler imprisoned Gypsies, Jews, Communists—all of his political rivals—we have to do the same thing with women.” He suggested that they be sent to “breeding gulags. The good ones will be liberated. The bad ones will toil in the mines forever.”
3. Also from Nick Fuentes, “Our No. 1 political enemy is women, because women constrain everything, every conversation, every man—everything.”

And it’s not just Nick Fuentes. It’s a whole host of influential men—podcasters, preachers, politicians. The fact that there is critical mass for this kind of misogyny is sobering. That there’s a substantive audience for it. I’ve always known there were the occasional deviants, maybe hundreds of them. But not hundreds of thousands of them. Not millions. This article finds them, shows them to us.

The quotes above are shock bait. But the article written by Helen Lewis is much deeper and nuanced. It examines the hard core misogynistic policy issues our country is considering, right now, in real time.

While the GOP might not be in their characteristic lockstep behind Trump due to problems with their constituents (Iran, inflation, the $250 bill with his face on it), they are still in lockstep over one problem they all share:

Women.

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Poetry: “Time Does Not Bring Relief,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay

In 2005, I was filling out my application to NYU’s Graduate Musical Theatre Program. One of the tasked involved putting a poem to music. The poem they gave me was by Edna St. Vincent Millay (Time Does Not Bring Relief). It was the first time I’d ever read her. It’s haunting, giving us loss and memory all in one taste.

Here it is, in all its bitter glory.

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**Every Wednesday and Saturday, I post my progress in this 1000-Day MFA—a Ray Bradbury-inspired project described here. I don’t email these posts, but they’re always available here (click on “1000-Day MFA” tab).

This short story teeters around in a drug-induced haze, the wanderings of two friends who work (high) at the hospital: a clerk and an orderly. For a while, you can’t tell if it’s an LSD trip or what’s actually happening. I’m still not completely sure, but I loved the language in this story:

“A champion of the drug LSD, a very famous guru of the love generation, is being interviewed amid a TV crew off to the left of the poultry cages. His eyeballs look like he bought them in a joke shop.”

And:

We listened to the big rigs going from San Francisco to Pennsylvania along the Interstate, like shudders down a long hacksaw blade…”

In the end, it’s a literary trip worth taking.

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Essay: “Ordinary Girls,” by Jaquira Díaz, from The Kenyon Review

Ordinary Girls is a brutal essay—hard to read, impossible to put down—that chronicles the environment and events leading up to two serious suicide attempts by very young Latina queer woman. First attempt, she was eleven. This was not a “cry for help.” It was an “I never want to wake up again.” Neither of these attempts worked, for various reasons.

These things don’t happen out of nowhere, and we are introduced to the casual and constant violence in her life. Her and all her friends. The more I read, the more I felt the visceral no way out of their lives, the system that kept them down, that kept them galloping in a hopeless gerbil wheel of suffering.

At one point during the essay, she mentioned how she’s failing in school, and I thought, “School?! How can school matter at all when you’re scrambling just to stay alive at home?” School meant less than nothing to me. And I was only reading about her life.

She and her 11-year-old girlfriend thought about death a lot. They’d heard of a French woman who was ‘one of the jumpers’ in Southgate Towers, her Papi’s highrise apartment complex, where he also worked as a security guard. When life is so cheap, sometimes death looks like the better option. But even that can be hard to implausibly achieve. Díaz leaves us with this:

“A couple of years after the French woman jumped, another woman—Papi’s friend—would fling herself off one of the balconies. The south tower this time. She would hit the side of the building, then the roof of the pool maintenance storage shed, then the ground. She would fall fifteen stories. And she would live.”

(p.s. I struggled with suicidal ideation many times during my younger years. One time, I sat in a window in a New York hotel, 35 stories up, aching to jump. The only thing that prevented me was this weird certainty that, yes, I would die—but I would be reborn immediately into another life, and I’d have to repeat all the same lessons until I reached this exact same spot…and learned to make a different decision.
I would have missed my whole life. So grateful I stuck around.)

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Poetry: “The Heart of a Woman,” by Georgia Douglas Johnson

Georgia Douglas Johnson: the first African-American woman poet to become famous since Frances E. W. Harper, Georgia Douglas Johnson was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and educated in public schools. Her emotional style is evident in her three books: The Heart of a Woman (1918), Bronze (1922), and An Autumn Love Cycle (1928).

The Heart of a Woman

“The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,
As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,
Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam
In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.

The heart of a woman falls back with the night,
And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars,
While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.”

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**Every Wednesday and Saturday, I post my progress in this 1000-Day MFA—a Ray Bradbury-inspired project described here. I don’t email these posts, but they’re always available here (click on “1000-Day MFA” tab).

What a compelling meditation on what it might be like to die suddenly on your honeymoon. Mauled by an alligator. Then ushered to ‘heaven’, where everyone is 33 years old, and you are given a chance to choose your physical features. Khong explores her issues with being Chinese and her relationship with her husband, Adam, even though she was only married to him for one day before she died.

She describes forgetting, little by little, her parents, her life ‘before.’ She describes trying very hard to remember Adam. His face. What he was like. Life in the new place is very much like life on earth, except without the hassles. Mostly pleasant, but they don’t want you to remember anything—they work to prevent nostalgia.

After a long time, she meets someone new. She likes him. We know who it is, but she doesn’t. And we experience this sort of darkroom negative of their falling in love. Again. This is a tender, haunting love story.

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Essay: “Life Between the Lines,” by Gloria Steinem, from Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

I’m 71, so I remember Gloria Steinem from when I was deeply embedded in the patriarchal world of my cowboy artist husband at the time. I borrowed his conservative outlook, and I’m ashamed of how asleep I was to the whole world.

But eventually I did wake up.

It took forever. Eighteen years and three children later, I ended up reading Steinem’s magnificent book, “Revolution from Within.” It gave me exactly what I needed: a pathway to my own backbone, and the self-compassion for all the years I hadn’t used it.

This essay, Life Between the Lines, sheds light on the vast world Ms. Steinem had to navigate—and how she sees it from her current vantage point. It is humbling to read. I have such a textured respect now, not only for her and her incalculable body of work, but for feminism itself.

The collection, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, is an important book that should be on everyone’s shelves.

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Poetry: “November,” by Billy Collins

November is the name of the poem. Billy Collins is a god. That’s all. Read it here.

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**Every Wednesday and Saturday, I post my progress in this 1000-Day MFA—a Ray Bradbury-inspired project described here. I don’t email these posts, but they’re always available here (click on “1000-Day MFA” tab).

It must be DEI Day here in 1000-Day MFA World. Three decidedly non-white writers with powerful gifts for us. Enjoy.

Written in the third person, this story shows us a woman’s slow awakening. It’s from her point of view as she processes her husband’s ‘midlife crisis’. He’s suddenly interested in martial arts, which she poo-poos because she’s only ever known him as a doughy, weak, terrified hypochondriac. Someone who believed that even strong laughter could cause heart failure.

She hates everything about this new phase. But we learn that she’s pretty much given up on herself as well, she’s not happy about anything. It’s very to watch her contempt rise up in response to his genuine compassion. We watch him train, work hard, never give up, even as we hear the running commentary in her mind (get this out of your system, you fool, you’re going to kill yourself).

It isn’t under the very end, maybe the very last word, that we see her wake up. This is her new husband. People can change. Nothing is static. All is well.

WORDS NEW TO ME:
melic - Melic is an adjective (used since 1699) that refers to song or lyric poetry, particularly the elaborate, sung Greek lyric poetry of the 7th-5th centuries BC. It denotes verse intended to be sung rather than just spoken.
sifu - Sifu (師父 or 师傅) is a Chinese term for a master, teacher, or skilled instructor
kumite: the sparring or combat training aspect of karate, where two practitioners engage using techniques from kata and kihon. It is one of the three main facets of karate (with kata and kihon), focusing on distance, timing, and control rather than100% force, and often serves as competitive, controlled fighting in dojos.
crepuscular - describes animals that are active primarily during twilight (dawn and dusk) or refers to anything resembling, relating to, or occurring in the dim, dusky light of this time. The term is derived from the Latin word creper ("dark") and is frequently used in biology, literature, and to describe light
gi - a martial arts uniform

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Essay: “Bajadas,” by Francisco Cantú (from Plowshares)

You hear about the border, the wall, the people trying to get into our country, risking everything they have. And you hear about those trying to keep them out.

But this essay feels like another animal altogether.

When they find backpacks that have been strategically placed to help immigrants survive in the desert—filled with clothing, water, food—some border patrol agents destroy them, piss on the contents, empty the water bottles into the sand. It’s violence by proxy, slow murder by remote control. It’s terrible to read about.

Then again, we learn of the Mexicans who have less than honorable plans—like the nineteen-year-old who admitted he wanted to go to Oregon to sell heroin, “un puño a la vez.”

But mostly, we come into close contact with desperate human beings, desperate for so many reasons, and the border patrol agent writing this essay shows us his increasing discomfort. During one Christmas with his mother, she says to him, “You know. . .it’s not just your safety I worry about. I know how the soul can be placed at hazard fighting impossible battles.”

She is not wrong.

The essay ends with him furious because they’re looking for a group of twenty, with women and children among them, but they’ve lost the trail. Now all he can think of is how powerless he is to help them survive. It left me with a profound look at the uncertainty of everyone’s fate, the horrible misapprehension of the bigger problem, and the sheer No Good Answers / No Way Out of it all.

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WORDS NEW TO ME:
cordillera - an extensive chain or series of parallel mountain ranges, typically forming the principal mountain system of a continent, such as the American Cordillera or the Andes. Derived from the Spanish word for "rope" or "string," these systems are often characterized by complex geological structures formed by tectonic plate collision, such as the Andes Mountains

Poetry: “The New Colossus,” by Emma Lazarus (1849-1887)

A descendant of Sephardic Jews who immigrated to the United States from Portugal around the time of the American Revolution, Emma Lazarus was a Jewish American poet and translator. Her sonnet, “The New Colossus,” is inscribed on a plaque on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty monument. She died at 38 of Hodgkins Lympoma.

Did you know this is who wrote the words, “Give me your tired, your poor…”

Emma Lazarus. I’m glad she did not live to see our current state of affairs. And yet, to slow down and read the poem again, it rekindles something vital in me.
“The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

What does this, what can this mean now, on May 2, 2026? What can I let it mean to me? How can I say it, and mean it, to the homeless and tempest-tost in my community? Read this poem mindfully. Let it in.

“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

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**Every Wednesday and Saturday, I post my progress in this 1000-Day MFA—a Ray Bradbury-inspired project described here. I don’t email these posts, but they’re always available here (click on “1000-Day MFA” tab).

This morning early, I was nudged to go to Earth Sanctuary—a quiet, holy place here on Whidbey Island—to record my message for you. Here it is.

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Such a devastating story of a Nigerian woman waiting in line at the American Embassy. Her four year old son had been killed the day before by one of the three drunk thugs sent to arrest her husband. A pro-Democracy journalist, he’d been targeted and now the government was coming for him. Someone tipped him off, so she drove him (in the trunk of their car) to a safe house and he escaped over the border. They agreed he’d apply for asylum when he got to New York, and she and their son, Ugonna, would do the same and meet him in New York.

Now she was standing in line at the American Embassy, numb with trauma and grief, not fully able to be present with what she was doing. Lots of advice about how to behave with the American officials. She wants them to stop talking so she can maintain a blank mind.

A new life. It was Ugonna who had given her a new life, surprised her by how quickly she took to the new identity he gave her, the new person he made her. “I’m Ugonna’s mother,” she would say at his nursery school, to teachers, to parents of other children. At his funeral in Umunnachi, because her friends and family had been wearing dresses in the same Ankara print, somebody had asked, “Which one is the mother?” and she had looked up, alert for a moment, and said, “I’m Ugonna’s mother.” She wanted to go back to their ancestral hometown and plant ixora flowers, the kind whose needle-thin stalks she had sucked as a child. One plant would do, his plot was so small. When it bloomed, and the flowers welcomed bees, she wanted to pluck and suck at them while squatting in the dirt. And afterwards, she wanted to arrange the sucked flowers side by side, like Ugonna had done with his LEGO blocks. That, she realized, was the new life she wanted.

She walks away without a word.
Her grief had closed her mouth.

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Essay: “A Republic of the Sensitive: E.M. Forster on the Personal and Political Power of Empaths and the Relationship Between Creativity and Democracy,“ by Maria Popova

(I usually include a photo of the author who’s written the essay—but this essay, by Maria Popova, is about an essay written by E.M. Forster just before the outbreak of WWII.

Maria Popova is a rich resource for me, in almost all categories—writers, art, science, politics, history, you name it. I receive her emails, and they always introduce me to an aspect of the world (or a famous person in it) that I knew nothing about. Enter E.M. Forster (pictured above in 1921).

He was a writer of international scope and power (Room With a View, Howard’s End, and A Passage to India). Maria Popova’s email focusses on his essay entitled, “What I Believe.” (out of print, but available through the public library).

We need his voice. NOW.

Just before the outbreak of WWII, he wrote this:

“I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too… I believe in aristocracy, though… Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke… Their temple… is the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and their kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide-open world.”

Poetry: “Accents,” by Denice Frohman

Denice Frohman performs "Accents" live at the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York, 2013 and the room catches fire.

But much more than this. My heart caught fire. My mind. My love for words. My love for this woman I never heard of, for my own ignorance that made me trip over my laptop keys and end up on this gorgeous poem. OH. MY. GOD. Watch this woman honor her mother and her accent.

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**Every Wednesday and Saturday, I post my progress in this 1000-Day MFA—a Ray Bradbury-inspired project described here. I don’t email these posts, but they’re always available here (click on “1000-Day MFA” tab).

This was a sweet read, but a little confusing. It starts with a description of Pet milk, and how it swirls into his grandmother’s coffee, and eventually his own. Somewhere in the story, he grows up, and he and his girlfriend are a year after college—with jobs and apartments and futures to dream toward. They have a shared love of the Pilsen, a place they frequented often enough to have their own designated waiter, Rudi (rolled R). He would always make them a King Alphonse (heavy cream and crème de cacao)—the sophisticated cousin of the coffee and Pet milk from his youth. The story’s end feels trunkated. He and his girlfriend on the train, consummating their love in the empty conductor’s compartment. A teenage kid on the platform of a town they’re whizzing by (it’s an express train, no local stops) catches what they’re doing, and waves. End of story.

I don’t know. It was fun to read, well described. But—

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Essay: “Names,” by Paul Crenshaw

I was married for almost two decades to a man who’d been a Marine in the Pacific during WWII. I recognize the bluster in this essay. The foul name calling. It’s a thing. It’s a necessity, part of how to get through whatever horror you go through in a war.

The “Names” described in this piece are the names everyone ended up with in basic training. They hadn’t gone to war yet. They were being prepared, demeaned, broken down, made to march “in big round wheels under the summer sun, all the called commands a way to discipline us, make us move as one unit instead of fifty different men, like the naming was to break us down so we could pull closer together.”

“Benavidez was Bean Burrito. . .and Alarid got called asshole more than his real name. . .I was Crankshaft or Cumshot or Cocksucker, depending on who was doing the calling, whether my fellow soldiers or the drill sergeants.” And so on, throughout the whole piece. Pretty soon, you come to appreciate these names as signs of affection. You begin to understand that this is just what happens as boys are discovering how to create the crust that they hope will protect them from God knows what’s coming.

The brilliance of this essay comes at the end of basic training. Saddam Hussein has invaded Kuwait. The group is assembled so the drill sergeants could tell them they’re going to war. There is some colorful braying of what we’re gonna do to that “fucking towel-headed sandnigger right in his fucking asshole,” Later that night, things get quiet. There are no jokes. No called names.

“Only a hundred quiet conversations, Alarid or Benavidez or Talley whispering across the big bay dorm, “Hey Crenshaw, hey man, are you scared?”

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Poetry: “Our Real Work,” by Wendell Berry

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

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**Every Wednesday and Saturday, I post my progress in this 1000-Day MFA—a Ray Bradbury-inspired project described here. I don’t email these posts, but they’re always available here (click on “1000-Day MFA” tab).

Brutal illustration of a mother teaching her daughter. The conceit is a repetition of instructions—many of them simple and practical, how to sew a button, make a buttonhole for the button, how to make medicine for a cold, or to make medicine to throw away a child before it becomes a child.

Woven into these instructions is the belief that if you’re this mother’s girl, you’re automatically a slut. “. . .this is how you set a table for dinner with an important guest. . .this is how to behave in the presence of men who don’t know you very well, and this way they won’t recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming. . .”

There are different iterations of that conviction. “[T]his is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming;” or, “on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming.”

It could be seen as a mother’s twisted attempt to protect her daughter from going down the wrong path. But it reads like a mother and daughter caught in the Judeo-Christian trap where if you’re a woman, you are by definition “the devil’s gateway.”

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Essay: “Namesake,” by Mason Stokes

Stokes examines his uncle’s life (the one he’s named after), as best he can, given that his parents never talked about the particulars. Their silence over the uncle’s “confirmed bachelor status” reigns supreme, even beyond the grave.

Stokes is gay and suspects that his uncle was as well, but it’s impossible to know for sure, given how deep the uncle’s closet was. Long after his uncle’s death, Stokes finds a photograph of him hugging another man—pictures taken during WWII. We learn that the military provided a kind of tacit ‘community’ for men of a certain persuasion, a place where it was almost safe for them to be who they were—within certain parameters.

He searches in vain for more definitive information, for proof that his uncle and he shared the same kind of life. But there simply isn’t enough evidence for it. That said, his uncle managed to live his life fully, and maintain his singularity. He never married. But he seemed relatively happy. Stokes finds a way to receive this as a gift.

“. . . not knowing in what ways he might claim me,” he writes, “I choose to claim him. For however much I needed a gay pride uncle, it was the closeted uncle whose example still guides me—the uncle who had, for over fifty years, and at whatever cost, carved out a space of possibility, carved out a life. In a world where the social pressures toward coupling can feel even greater than the pressures toward heterosexuality, I need his example, and his name, now more than ever.”

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Poetry: “april,” by Lucille Clifton

april

bird and bird
over the thawing river
circling parker
waving his horn
in the air above the osprey’s
nest my child
smiling her I know something
smile their birthday
is coming. they are trying
to be forty. they will fail
they will fall
each from a differen year
into the river into the bay
into an ocean of marvelous things.

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**Every Wednesday and Saturday, I post my progress in this 1000-Day MFA—a Ray Bradbury-inspired project described here. I don’t email these posts, but they’re always available here (click on “1000-Day MFA” tab).

I’d never read Raymond Carver until now. This short story has shown me how many colors there are on its palette. The drama in it is fairly tame. Two fathers fight on the porch, arguing about their young sons and who is responsible for the missing bicycle. But the nuance of emotion in the story ushers the heart into nineteen different worlds, and leaves it full of anxiety and suspicion.

At the end, the father has just tucked in his eleven-year-old boy after the bicycle drama has unfolded. As the father’s hand moves toward the light switch, the son says, “Dad? You’ll think I’m pretty crazy, but I wish I’d known you when you were little. I mean, about as old as I am right now. I don’t know how to say it, but I’m lonesome about it. It’s like—it’s like I miss you already if I think about it now.”

At the end, we are shipwrecked with tenderness.

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Essay: “Olivia,” by Isabel Allende, from “The Best Dog in the World”

A marriage of almost three decades has ended—a marriage that survived losing two of her husband’s children (drug addiction) as well as her own daughter dying of severe porphyria. Usually, one loss of that magnitude finishes a marriage. But this one stays whole through all three losses. Isabel Allende and her husband, Willie, clearly loved each other a great deal.

Perhaps one of the most important supporting characters in their lives was Olivia, their beloved rescue dog. She was part of their lives for seventeen years, and died a very short time after they divorced.

The essay shows us their deep love for Olivia—and, curiously, tells us about a ghost that lived in the house Willie designed and built, inspired by the structure described in “The House of Spirits.” This actual ghost, John McNear, a sailor from the early 1900s, originally lived on the land that held Allende’s home. Olivia always knew when McNear was there. Her hair would stand on end, and she would snarl and growl, whenever he was present.

Bottom line, Olivia was a profoundly beloved dog, and we can pretty much all relate. Personally, I love realizing that a writer of Isabel Allende’s international stature can have her heart nurtured and then broken in exactly the same way as mine was when we lost our dog.

We are all cut down to size when it comes to our pets.

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Poetry: “The Year of No Grudges,” by Andrea Gibson, from You Better Be Lightning

Do yourself a favor. Plant four minutes and fifty-five seconds in the soil of your life, and watch this. Let it take root your heart, and grow.

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**Every Wednesday and Saturday, I post my progress in this 1000-Day MFA—a Ray Bradbury-inspired project described here. I don’t email these posts, but they’re always available here (click on “1000-Day MFA” tab).

Elliot Spencer is told from the point of view of 89, something we think at first is a robot, some very advanced form of robot. I’m led to believe that they’ve figured out how to turn a robot into a man—some’one’ extremely lifelike, with an actual body that has flesh and bones and joints and genitals.

But soon, I realize it’s something much more horrible.

89 is — or was — a man turned into a robot. A man who fell on very hard times, became an alcoholic, and lived under the bridge with other homeless folks. These people were curated by a nefarious company experimenting with a procedure called “scraping.” All memory is scraped, and then they retrain the being to serve the evil purposes of an invisible corporate/political entity.

The story takes shape as 89 begins to remember his original name: Elliot Spencer. He remembers the events that came before his ‘kidnapping.’

It’s chilling. It’s heartbreaking. And it’s a great read.

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Essay: “Bastards” by Lee Martin, from The Georgia Review

Father/son trouble. A story as old as people. But this father had hooks for hands (a farming accident), and it made him angry. And his anger made the son angry, and so on and so forth.

Exquisitely written, he speaks of how things were between his father and himself during times in the house when they were alone and the father needed something that only the son could provide (holding a drinking cup, or zipping/unzipping his pants, or for using the toilet): “We’d be on the other side of our anger by then,” he says, “but our language would still be the language of old foes, wary and reserved. The language of men who mistrusted our right to this love born from scars, considering it of questionable origin.”

Absolutely beautiful piece of work.

Words new to me:
Spurious - inauthentic

Poetry: “High Heat,” by Jeffrey McDaniel

Jeffrey Daniel is a great wordsmith. Can’t wait to see more of his work. But for what it’s worth, here is a tiny taste of his work:

The High Heat

Hovering over a plate of spumoni in the kitchen,
I grip the handle of my spoon. A hundred miles away,
in public housing for seniors, my mother sets,
twirls into her windup, cocks her arm back
and unleashes a wad of bills, that she can’t pay,
from a Home Shopping Network binge,
miraculously amassed without a credit card.
The pitch zooms up and in. The whiskers
quiver on my chin. I told you no more
curve balls, mom. I kick my spikes into the wood floor.
But I’m a curve ball pitcher, she says, adjusting her cap.

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**Every Wednesday and Saturday, I post my progress in this 1000-Day MFA—a Ray Bradbury-inspired project described here. I don’t email these posts, but they’re always available here (click on “1000-Day MFA” tab).

Reading about how much each thing weighed drove home the cost of war. The actual number of ounces certain weapons, or ammo, or protective gear weighed. I had thought about how hard it must’ve been psychologically, emotionally to be a soldier in the Vietnam war—but I never knew to think about how heavy everything was that you had to carry.

Or how much marching there was, just “humping” from one place to the next with no real purpose or strategy. Just the feet going one in front of the other, all day, under unimaginable circumstances.

This was incredibly well written by someone who clearly knows the territory better than he wants to. It made me sad in a way that I found very hard to shake. I kind of don’t want to say too much about it. Except, you should read it. Everyone should.

War is not abstract. It’s real and immediate and the consequences are devastating—and I know you already know that. But reading this piece brings it home in a way that I didn’t know was possible.

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Essay: “Big Night,” by Jill Sisson Quinn, from New England

This essay brings the reader into two worlds at once: the world of salamanders, and the world of childless parents who want to adopt. I knew nothing of either subject, so it was a very steep learning curve.

Big Night refers to the annual noctural mass-mating ritual of salamanders. They live singly all year long, but on a single evening, the party begins. It was fascinating to learn about this. If you want to witness this event, or even see a salamander during a ‘big night,’ you have to be incredibly dedicated and astute. And lucky.

Which, understandably, also applies if you want to win the “adoption lottery”—a process whereby hopeful potential parents fill out extremely complicated adoption papers (some of the things you check “yes,” “no,” or “maybe” for: premature birth, heart murmur, cleft lip, or drug use during pregnancy). They send them into the agency, where twice a year (in May and November), the applications are numbered, then the numbers are pulled from a hat.

That’s only the beginning of the process. Then, there are other hoops to jump through before the prize it won. Quinn describes her research, some of which made my eyes glaze over. There was information about women who wanted children but couldn’t have them, about women who didn’t want children and what to make of that. There were percentage breakdowns of the different age groups of women who adopt, and the various success rates at that, and the ways different decades showed very different results.

I lost track. But just as I’d get overwhelmed and want to stop reading, she’d switch to more information about the spotted salamander, and I was interested again. I very much wanted her to see the spotted salamander.

Quinn and her husband so wanted to be parents. They didn’t win the adoption lottery—but they did get to see the exciting Big Night for the blue spotted salamanders—not the one she was looking for, but was still a pretty amazing experience.

Poetry: “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers,” by Emily Dickinson

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**Every Wednesday and Saturday, I post my progress in this 1000-Day MFA—a Ray Bradbury-inspired project described here. I don’t email these posts, but they’re always available here (click on “1000-Day MFA” tab).

Voice. Voices. Two old women with a painful pair of intertwined pasts. Neither one of them is a stellar human. Neither has a good relationship with their daughters.

George Saunders has a particular gift for imagining the moment of death, as exhibited by his new book, Vigil, as well as Lincoln in the Bardo.

This short story is written from two points of view—first Alma, an old woman being walked around by her daughter on Mother’s Day, then Debbie, Alma’s nemesis, Alma’s husband’s favorite of his many lovers. They run into each other on the walk. Alma happens to die across the street from Debbie. And the story takes us through Alma’s ordeal. Heaven, or hell, or death or life itself is trying to get her to take responsibility for her choices, something she will not do.

It’s riveting, and visceral. It’s effective. And I feel like it’s the real truth.

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Essay: “World at War,” by J. Brent Bill, from Life Lessons from a Bad Quaker

This essay does not mince words. He lays out how he feels right there on the table—he’s authentic, warts and all. He doesn’t pretend to be the embodiment of virtue. What he does instead is flesh out how hard it is to live the Quaker principles.

He asks the questions:
“How can I confront violence with peace—even when my personal relationships are concerned? . . .
”Am I really willing to leave vengeance to God and pray for my enemies?” . . .
”Who in my life just needs a good smack? Why do I feel that way about him, her, or them?” . . .
”What do I do to remain peaceful when something really annowing happens? Or beyong annoying?”

This is the work of someone genuinely grappling with the hard realities of his faith. It’s inspiring. Especially when he ends with a a quote from Friend Sydney Bailey:
”Peace begins within ourselves. It is to be implemented within the family, in our meetings, in our work and leisure, in our own localities, and internationally. The task will never be done. Peace is a process to engage in, not a goal to be reached. The task will never be done.”

This made me feel better about how far away from it I feel right now. Knowing I’ll never get there helps me stop looking for it “out there.” It’s actually easier to find it “in here,” and to vow to nurture it there for my remaining days.

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Poetry: “Annunciation,” by Marie Howe, from “New and Selected Poems”

Many of Marie Howe’s poems are profound imaginings of events in Jesus’ (and his family’s) life. This one—“Annunciation”—takes us to the moment when Mary was told what was happening. It is a masterpiece of walking into a moment that everyone else thinks they know about, and showing it to us from a different, much more intimate point of view.

I invite you to read it, but slowly. Really let yourself go there. You’ll come back just a little changed. :-)

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**Every Wednesday and Saturday, I post my progress in this 1000-Day MFA—a Ray Bradbury-inspired project described here. I don’t email these posts, but they’re always available here (click on “1000-Day MFA” tab).

Reading this story taught me a lot about ‘voice.’ This one is told in a disjointed, disorganized way that felt very much like I was hearing it direct from the person herself—not from the extremely skilled writer offering it up to me. She tells you things in pieces, and you have to intuit what happened; and maybe you’ll get the defining piece later, maybe not.

A young girl has a drunk, violent family from whom she hides by not talking. It doesn’t really work, but it’s all she knows. She and her younger sister are not safe from their grandpa’s advances. She manages to make a friend, but then betrays her in the most innocent, understandable way. It’s heartbreaking. Her Uncle John is the only decent one in her life, but he too fails her.

It’s the best story I ever heard told by someone not good at telling stories. I’m absolutely fascinated by this magic trick of literature.

The very last three words in it, containing both surprise and inevitability, deliver a gut punch that hits so hard you can only nod your head for a moment of—silence.

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Essay: “Difference Maker,” by Meghan Daum, from The New Yorker

This essay gives the reader an unvarnished view of what it’s like to advocate for children in the child welfare system. Daum admits to not wanting children of her own, but wants to try doing some good anyway by having this tangential relationship with kids through the system.

She is trying also to assuage “the Central Sadness” in her marriage, as her husband very much wants to be a father. She tried being a mentor, then a Big Sister, but neither position worked out really. So she fell into advocacy for kids in the welfare system. This seemed to suit her better as she was dealing more with adults (lawyers, social workers, judges, etc.) than children.

She and her husband consider adopting an older child—someone maybe about to age out of the system—but this falls flat once they see the realities involved.

Throughout the essay, one kid keeps being featured—‘Matthew,’ a 12- then 13-year-old kid who’s been bouncing around in institutional homes, and who’s been almost adopted several times. He’s developed psychological survival skills that Daum comes to respect, however unpleasant they might be. She tries to do what she can within the limits of her professional role in his life.

It’s not really enough.

She writes, “Wary as I’ve always been of our culture’s reflextive idealization—even obsessive sanctification—of the bond between parent and child, it seems that I fell for another kind of myth. I fell for the myth of the village. I fell for the idea that nurture from a loving adoptive community could erase or at least heal the abuses of horrible natural parents.”

It doesn’t. It can’t. She learns this, while still trying in whatever way possible to heal or erase the Central Sadness in her own marriage.

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Poetry: “You Begin,” by Margaret Atwood

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only 
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

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** Every Wednesday and Saturday, I post my progress in this 1000-Day MFA—a Ray Bradbury-inspired project described here. I don’t email these posts, but they’re always available here (click on “1000-Day MFA” tab).

This is a 327-word tone poem of a story about an impoverished Mexican-American boy. His teacher does not remember his name. He is described as a “forty-pound body of boy with its geography of scars, its history of hurt, limbs stuffed with feathers and rags.” He helps his mama, herding his two little brothers, getting them ready to go to school. He is too young for all of it, but he does it without complaint.

I couldn’t find a link to it, but it’s in the Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story. This is a small jewel of words.

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Essay: “Sexual Paranoia,” by Laura Kipnis, from “The Chronicle Review”

Here is the essay, published on February 27, 2015 in The Chronicle of Higher Education. It almost undid the author’s career. The essay—which addresses academia’s misguided attempts to prevent sexual harassment through ineffective policies—deserves a thorough, careful read. It raises important, hard questions.

The world is messy. It just is. And our culture is creating young people who are “committed to their own vulnerability, [and] conditioned to imagine they have no agency.” This is a problem.

Of course, it’s tricky territory. So much gray area exists in the field of human desire. But I think we can all agree that not all professors are rapists just waiting for their chance. And not all students are helpless victims with no defenses whatsoever. There are certainly students who have actively come on to their professors. And there are also professors who have lost their careers because of unproven allegations, professors who later were found innocent.

Kipnis says, “For the record, I strongly believe that bona fide harassers should be chemically castrated, stripped of their property, and hung up by their thumbs in the nearest public square. Let no one think I’m soft on harassment. But I also believe that the myths and fantasies about power perpetuated in these new codes are leaving our students disabled when it comes to the ordinary interpersonal tangles and erotic confusions that pretty much everyone has to deal with at some point in life…” (emphasis mine).

My belief is that everyone, boys, girls, men, women, trans, bi, gay, whoever…EVERYONE needs to be taught at a young age that everyone matters. That respect, especially self-respect, is paramount.

If we’re ever going to stop being victims of unfair power dynamics, we will have to stop seeing ourselves as victims. And start valuing and nourishing our own backbones.

At 19, I married an artist 31 years older than me. Guess what? I went after him. Yes, I did. He had qualities that I wanted, and I was determined to have him, and have him I did. Talk about a power differential. He was charismatic, powerful, funny, earthy, and self-educated. He had a million good traits. We were together eighteen years, and we had three children together.

But he was also narcissistic, manipulative, and often treated people (especially his family) with psychological brutality. During our marriage I had multiple nervous breakdowns (one in which I was hospitalized for two months). His wife before me almost ended her life jumping in front of a train. His best friend of twenty years shot himself in the mouth with a .45 (and lived!)

He was hard to live with.

Notwithstanding all that, the final divorce decree stated that *I* had to pay him half of everything coming to me from a family trust until his death (which happened almost nineteen years after the divorce).

Still. Was I his victim? Absolutely not. I loved him. We made life together. He was not perfect. I was not perfect. It didn’t go the way I wanted. And in the end it was desperately unfair. But not because I was his victim.

He showed me where my backbone was.
I found it by saying enough. Is it his fault I didn’t say so sooner? NO. I’m the one who told myself stories, who excused him, who remained silent, who apologized, who bargained.

If I were to blame anyone, I would blame the fucked up society that romanticized these kinds of couplings. I would blame the patriarchy.
But really, I have no patience for blame.

The thing most precious to me is wisdom.

And I received wisdom when I left him, paid the price, and then found joy after joy, afterward.

I’m happy now.
Nobody legislated that. Nobody instituted rules to make me safe from all that suffering. Nobody put him in jail or found against him in court.

It doesn’t matter, because my happiness is mine—in a way that no one can take it away from me.

And by the way, my own sexual history is a mess. I’m culpable for all kinds of awful misdeeds over the past 50-odd years or so. Life is an ungovernable circus, and we’re all in the thick of it whether we like it or not. It’s all for learning.

I learned (at my own and everyone else’s expense)—through therapy, friendships, yoga, meditation, prayer, and just hunkering down to take a good long look at myself—how to love the little girl who climbed all the mountains she climbed, how to behave with integrity now, and how to let myself live.

May we all stop looking to the external world for sanctuary from suffering.
Suffering is a part of life. There’s no getting away from that. But we can learn to invite it in for tea. To stop being so afraid of it. To sit by the fire and learn from it.

From there, we can meet the whole world with our whole heart.

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Poetry: “The Ponds,” by Mary Oliver, from “House of Light”

The Ponds

“. . .Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled—
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing—
that the light is everything—that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and falling. And I do.”

― Mary Oliver, House of Light

The above is an excerpt from the whole poem, which will give you a fuller take on “the sum of each flawed blossom.” We are all flawed blossoms, all capable of light within the great mystery.

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** Every Wednesday and Saturday, I post my progress in this 1000-Day MFA—a Ray Bradbury-inspired project described here. I don’t email these posts, but they’re always available here (click on “1000-Day MFA” tab).

This is a hard, hard story to read. A litany of violence, all kinds, all colors, all ages. And all happening to and/or because of prolific family that has propagated itself for generations in poverty. One great grandmother had eighteen children, the next eleven. Never less than six.

It is a story of the wild variety of ways in which people can suffer and make each other suffer. One passage about this family: “…I cannot tell half their stories. Somehow it was always made to seem they killed themselves: car wrecks, shotguns, dusty ropes, screaming, falling out of windows, things inside them. I am the point of a pyramid, sliding back under the weight of the ones who came after, and it does not matter that I am the lesbian, the one who will not have children.”

The narrator lies in bed with her lover, who has lived a sweet, charmed life untouched by trouble. She ticks off the countless grisly versions of human brutality. It’s impossible to hold, but these things happen and we know it.

When her loving partner asks why she doesn’t want children (“You’re so good with children, so gentle”), the narrator’s thoughts go here:
I think of all the times my hands have curled into fists, when I have just barely held on. I open my mouth, close it, can’t speak. What could I say now? All the times I have not spoken before, all the things I just could not tell her, the shame, the self-hatred, the fear; all of that hangs between us now—a wall I cannot tear down. I would like to turn around and talk to her, tell her . . . “I’ve got a dust river in my head, a river of names endlessly repeating. That dirty water rises in me, all those children screaming out their lives in my memory, and I become someone else, someone I have tried so hard not to be.” But I don’t say anything, and I know, as surely as I know I will never have a child, that by not speaking I am condemning us, that I cannot go on loving you and hating you for your fairy-tale life, for not asking about what you have no reason to imagine, for that soft-chinned innocence I love.

It’s a hard read. But one definitely worth reading.

Essay: “Some Jokes Are Funnier Than Others,” by Roxane Gay, from “Bad Feminist”

This essay poked me in the psyche. Hard. I come from a family where humor was in high regard. My grandfather was a world-renowned Vaudeville comedian who performed internationally—for everyone from kings and queens to leper colonies. (Ole Olsen of Olsen & Johnson, in case anyone is curious.)

It’s 100 years later, and while humor is stilll important to me, I have my preferences. While I can appreciate Don Rickles, he’s not my jam. But it doesn’t push a rage button. There are bits that Louis CK does that I think are close to enlightened, but much of his other humor is hard to take and—again—not my jam. The one requirement I have for anyone’s humor is that it be intelligent.

Roxane Gay’s essay mentions Daniel Tosh, a comedian who ended up in the news thirteen years ago because a woman stood up during his set and said, “Rape jokes are never funny.” To which he replied, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like five guys right now? Like right now?”

She unpacks that moment—both for what it says about how we’ve completely distorted what free speech means, and for the state of our culture, that he said that and it made people laugh. She expressed her sadness that this brave woman was alone in calling him out.

I have to say, it’s troubling that Daniel Tosh got to be as big as he is. That his version of ‘humor’ actually elicits laughter. What has to happen for that kind of truly base drivel to tickle someone’s funny bone?

Humor is supposed to push boundaries. I really get that. There are people who can pull this off, both men and women. But boy oh boy there’s a line.

I felt that line clearly, in my bones. But it wasn’t at a comedy show. It was on a hike with a group of friends. We were appreciating one of us who wasn’t there, talking about how funny he was. Someone said, “Yeah, we were together the other day and a gorgeous jogger went by, and he said ‘man, look at the runaway stick on that rape victim.’”

It soured in my belly. I didn’t laugh, but I didn’t say anything either. It saddened me, because the man who made that comment was someone I had known and liked. A lot.

Some jokes are funnier than others. That comment was not. Tosh’s rape joke was not. Rape jokes aren’t funny. I’m okay with saying that. Let it bring up the important questions. Where is free speech important? What are its limits? Where are the lines?

Some of my favorite comics are Josh Johnson, Gina Brillon, Lewis Black, Kathleen Madigan, and George Carlin. What about you? Who are your faves? And what are your thoughts about comedy and free speech? Click on the “Leave a comment” button and tell me. I’m interested.

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Poetry: “One Day,” by Marie Howe, from “New and Selected Poems”

“One day, the patterned carpet, the folding chairs,
the woman in the blue suit by the door examining her split ends,
all of it will go on without me. I’ll have disappeared,
as easily as a coin under lake water, and few to notice the difference…”

Read the whole poem here. It’s a complete gem.

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** Every Wednesday and Saturday, I post my progress in this 1000-Day MFA—a Ray Bradbury-inspired project described here. I don’t email these posts, but they’re always available here (click on “1000-Day MFA” tab).

The form of this story captivated me. It was written in 1986, during the AIDS epidemic, when it was heavily stigmatized and often spoken of indirectly. The first sentence gives you the flavor of the story (and yes, that whole thing is one sentence):

At first he was just losing weight, he felt only a little ill, Max said to Ellen, and he didn’t call for an appointment with his doctor, according to Greg, because he was managing to keep on working at more or less the same rhythm, but he did stop smoking, Tanya pointed out, which suggests he was frightened, but also that he wanted, even more than he knew, to be healthy, or healthier, or maybe just to gain back a few pounds, said Orson, for he told her, Tanya went on, that he expected to be climbing the walls (isn’t that what people say?) and found, to his surprise, that he didn’t miss cigarettes at all and reveled in the sensation of his lungs being ache-free for the first time in years.”

We follow the progression of the main character’s illness (neither he nor his disease are ever named) through an interwoven succession of conversations among his circle of friends. We gradually learn that Quentin is probably the one closest to him, probably his main partner, but that’s never made totally clear, which I think is brilliant on Sontag’s part.

We learn that he loved Aileen, but she almost never visits. We learn so many things that are never clearly defined, that even the people in the story couldn’t define, and that feels so much like real life to me. The conversations, rumors, calls, heart-to-hearts continue to paint a worsening picture for the main character, and nobody wants to face the brutal truth of the situation. Here’s how it ends:

“And he was still writing his diary, not showing it to anyone, though Tanya, first to arrive one late-winter morning, and finding him dozing, peeked, and was horrified, according to Greg, not by anything she read but by a progressive change in his handwriting: in the recent pages, it was becoming spidery, less legible, and some lines of script wandered and tilted about the page. I was thinking, Ursula said to Quentin, that the difference between a story and a painting or photograph is that in a story you can write, He’s still alive. But in a painting or a photo you can’t show “still.” You can just show him being alive. He’s still alive, Stephen said.”

I, Tina, remember the AIDS epidemic, how much fear and hysteria was around it. My very first real boyfriend died of it. When I heard that he had it, years after I’d married the father of my children, I went to visit him. It almost ended my marriage. He forbade me to go, for fear I would ‘catch it.’ We knew enough then to know that was BS, so I went anyway. I’m so glad I did.

He was in fairly good shape, and I got to hug him and wish him well, talk about old times. He died a few months later. The Susan Sontag story reads exactly how we all talked at that time.

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Essay: “The Man Who Broke Physics,” by Sally Jenkins

Ray Bradbury says, in his speech where I learned about the 1000-Day MFA, to stuff yourself with as much reading as you can—from all genres. Of course read the classics, that, for sure. But also read magazines. Pick up a copy of the Family Handyman at the library, or Quilting Arts, or whatever’s lying around in the waiting room at the dentist. Let the world of words flow through you like a river. Soon, you’ll recognize great writing from good writing, and good from bad.

The Atlantic is no slouch, so I picked up the March issue, but I read an article I wouldn’t usually read. The Man Who Broke Physics, by the wellknown sports writer Sally Jenkins. What a blast it was to read.

Here’s just a small excerpt:
”One of the pleasures of watching Ilia Malinin, apart from his indifference to gravity, is to witness him becoming…Becoming a master of quadruple jumps that no one else can land, rising with all the ease of a young Michael Jordan—before landing on a pair of butcher knives, on ice.” That’s fun writing. And it of course made me want to read more.

This young man was raised (and eventually coached) by a pair of professional skaters from Russia, with a very healthy attitude. They didn’t actually want him to skate professionally. They wanted him to have a healthy childhood without the insane pressures exerted on elite athletes. But when he showed his own innate curiosity and desire, they nurtured it.

And he became this.

His parents coached him even through the pandemic when all the rinks were closed. They are often asked what they did, what their secret was. Ilia’s maternal grandfather (also a coach) answered. “There are no secrets,” Valeri told Russia 24. It’s been a simple matter of the Russian method colliding with American possibility—in the person of creative young athlete determined to explore the limits of his sport.

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Poetry: “The Star Market,” by Marie Howe

I’ve visited Marie Howe’s poetry before in previous posts, here, and here. Her poetry reaches me where I live, and in my opinion nobody suffers from reading more Marie Howe poems. This one is one we could all afford to read, beginning with this:

“The people Jesus loved were shopping at The Star Market yesterday
An old lead-colored man standing next to me at the checkout
breathed so heavily I had to step back a few steps.”

By the time I got to the end of it, I was humbled by it.

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** Every Wednesday and Saturday, I post my progress in this 1000-Day MFA—a Ray Bradbury-inspired project described here. I don’t email these posts, but they’re always available here (click on “1000-Day MFA” tab).

I read this because I committed to reading 1000 short stories before I die. But this one felt like a waste. I have no patience for this kind of subject matter.

It hit me very much like The Telephone Call by Dorothy Parker. It’s a woman obsessing about her man, wondering what he’s thinking, if and when he’ll call, how much he does or doesn’t love her, and, in the case of this particular short story, whether or not he’s telling her the truth. I don’t care, and as a reader I need to care about at least one of the characters in a story.

One interesting quote from this piece seemed to be blood stain seeping through our current political situation: “…sometimes just because he says it to me over and over again I am convinced it is the truth because I don’t believe he would repeat a lie so often. Maybe the truth does not matter, but I want to know it if only so that I can come to some conclusions…”

That’s a whole separate blogpost, but I refuse to bore you with something that pointless and obvious.

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Essay: “Vision,” by Tiffany Briere

This is an essay that examines the confluence of science and what scientists might call ‘superstition.’ Written by a researcher studying diabetes and epilepsy in rodents in a neurophysiology lab. If you are squeamish, you should skip this one. She describes in graphic detail what must be done for conclusions to be drawn that will ultimately help us in those realms. I didn’t mean to lead with this aspect, but it was important to mention.

We learn that Briere’s mother is suffering with multiple ailments and is yearning for death. In her pain, she sees a vision of her dead cousin. Briere explores the palpable but invisible presence of her West Indian ancestors against the backdrop of her life as a scientist.

Her husband was a fellow grad student teaching the practical section of the physiology course she was taking—that was how they met. He seems to be a compassionate partner, able to coexist with her very different culture.

“No one has ever spoken to my husband about visions or the ubiquity of the dead. He is of German descent, not West Indian, but over time he’s learned that this intimacy with the dead—for him, unimaginable and unreal—is woven into the fabric of my family. He’s a scientist for a reason, drawn to black-and-white explanations of the world. But there, in my mother’s bed, he holds her hand, willing to consider all things possible.”

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Poetry: “You Reading This, Be Ready,” by William Stafford

My friends. This one. I was going to use the whole month of March to post short stories, essays and poems only written by women—to honor the theme of the month. But this poem is too perfect for right this moment. So I’m letting William Stafford break through.

Read it and be healed of distraction, of suffering and the need for freedom from suffering:

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

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** Every Wednesday and Saturday, I post my progress in this 1000-Day MFA—a Ray Bradbury-inspired project described here. I don’t email these posts, but they’re always available here (click on “1000-Day MFA” tab).

This story is written in full view from the fourth wall. “I would like you to write a simple story just once more,” her father says to her. “[T]he kind de Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov...” He’s got a very specific idea of what he wants to hear. She obliges. Tells him a bare bones, unhappy story about a woman with a teenaged son. They become addicts. He gets clean and moves out, never to be seen again. The mother grieves.

Story was a paragraph long.

The father scoffs. Very funny. That’s not what I meant. There’s more to it. You left everything out. They haggle. She relents. Tells the story again, while the father interrupts a lot, pushing for certain elements. Accuses her of joking around, but this is a tragedy.

Start again, he says. Now[ she tells it only more poetically, gives the characters depth, dimension, interiority, motivation.

Throughout the conversation, the story being told develops more presence in the room while another story comes into view with blurred edges. It seems like it’s showing up inside the obvious one, or underneath it somehow. The daughter is trying to emerge from it, trying to be seen.

It’s poignant, this age old parent/child clash. The father is bent on certainty, tragedy, the clear ending. The daughter not so much. She argues for the character’s potential, the mother’s possibilities. “Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life,” she says.

And that’s what she leaves us with.
How she does that is a marvel.

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Essay: “Charade,” by Kendra Atleework, from Hayden’s Ferry Review

Two girls who live near each other travel together from friendship into that desperation that becomes depression in a small town far from everywhere. They’ve both lost their mothers—one to divorce, the other to cancer—and are being raised in poverty by vague, lonely fathers. The essay is written by Kendra, whose mother died. It’s a snapshot of a the time shortly afterward.

“At sixteen, we decayed. Our skin gathered in the asthmatic carpet of the bathroom. We left pieces of our bodies in the dark corners of my house on the afternoons we ventured there, eyelashes drifting in the shadows between rafters on the redwood ceiling, floating away from us, only to grow back. We crumbled under a light snow on Mountain View Drive, when the sky was huge and gray above Wheeler Crest. We fell apart in the halls of our tiny high school, where our lockers were pocked with bullet-hole stickers and the roof caved in every winter from the weight of snow.

Kendra’s friend, Elizabeth, survived a suicide attempt but descended into drugs. In front of the mirror, at the end of this essay, Kendra writes: “With makeup gone I was undeniably warm and living, and I shook with the realization that perhaps we were not as beautiful as we were permanent.”

WORDS NEW TO ME:
sloughing: shed or remove (or be dropped off)

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Poetry: “Moonset,” by Sharon Olds

Moonset

This poem is one I need to spend time with. Really open, read, and let in. And read again. Let myself not understand it but hear it like music. Open the next door through. Let it in fully. I’m learning to do this more and more. And these poems take up residence in in the heart like small animals, hungry for my listening.

Before first light, there was something on the wall
like a pane — a presence, oblique, as if,
outside, there was a stone standing on the air,
exuding light. The full moon,
on the gloss of the painted plaster, shone
like a pale breast — lit, from within,
through the scar tissue’s rivulets,
as though it is all right to love
the idea of motherly sweetness in anything.
I put my hand into it, as if
into the side of one returned
from the dead. And out over the western river,
there she was, going over onto
the top of her head, that first spot
where air had touched her, who did not know
how not to love, or how to love.
And she upside-downed, comet with no
robe of coma trailing it,
and to the south, the seeds of some late stars
still held, dog star, throne, Orion —
the outline creature, like the young in their strollers,
smiling as if outside history,
like the tiny skeleton figure on sonogram
moving its hand through the waters, its five
fingers combing the real. And I saw it’s all
right to love the child, even if
the child were oneself — someone in me changed
sides, at dawn, without asking me. And so
goodbye, my queen, my fearsome darling,
house of horror of my heart. I do not
know how I’ll live without you, the sword of your
terrible worth. And the disc the color
of flame, doused by cream, was slowly
deposited into the earth.

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** Every Wednesday and Saturday, I post my progress in this 1000-Day MFA—a Ray Bradbury-inspired project described here. I don’t email these posts, but they’re always available here (click on “1000-Day MFA” tab).

Brawlers is a collection of short stories by Lauren Groff, who not only received the Joyce Carol Oates Prize in 2022, but was a three-time finalist for the National Book Award (for Arcadia, Fates and Furies, and Florida).

The first story in this collection is called The Wind, a harrowing story of a near escape from violence. A mother and her children quietly go about their morning routine while he sleeps, but they’re not going to school and she’s not going to work. The reader is gradually shown the extent of the violence they’ve suffered, but it happens in a glancing, unsentimental but irrefutable way.

I say ‘near escape’ because you think, right up to the end, that they’ve done it, they’ve gotten away—but in the last paragraph, they haven’t. The children survived, but not the mother—and again, we’re not told exactly how she was killed or why and how the children got away. But we know that the mother didn’t make it and the children did.

The story is told by the daughter of one of those children.

It ends with this haunting passage, one which will be with me for a long time:
“. . .always inside my mother there would blow a silent wind, a wind that died and gusted again, raging throughout her life, touching every moment she lived after this one. She tried her best, but she couldn’t help filling me with this same wind. It seeped into me through her blood…through every night she waited, shaking with fear, for me to come home by curfew, through every scolding, everything she forbade me to say or think or do or be, through all the ways she taught me how to move as a woman in the world. She was far from being the first to find it blowing through her, and of course I will not be the last. I look around and can see it in so many other women, passed down from a time beyond history, this wind that is dark and ceaseless and raging within.”

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Essay: “Rod Dreher’s Demons,” by Robert F. Worth, from The Atlantic, March 2026

Usually I post a photo of the writer of the essay that I’m covering (Robert F. Worth), but this time, I decided to go with the subject of the essay—Rod Dreher. Maybe because I loved the image so much (thank you Erika Nina Suárez). But also, I wanted you to see the person we’re talking about. The article tag for The Atlantic says, “He derides the enlightenment secularism, and the modern world. Conservatives—including the Vice President—are joining him on a march back to the Middle Ages.”

Once again, I’m in over my head—a feeling I often encounter as I make my way through this 1000-Day MFA**. This essay makes me wish that I had a better background in geopolitics and theology. But what I lack in those fields, I more than make up for in the willingness to read. I will do my best to meet Mr. Worth and Mr. Dreher from where I am, with what I’ve got.

Dreher was raised Catholic, but left the church and formally converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. He refers to himself as an "ex-Catholic" who is "firmly Orthodox". And Worth says, that “Dreher…is entirely sincere in his beliefs, and his deepest concerns are more religious than political.”

While he disagrees with Trump in many ways, “he seems tempted by the idea that Trump’s wrecking ball could clear the ground for a cultural rebirth.” Not the kind of rebirth you’re thinking of. In Dreher’s world, it would mean “a return to the Middle Ages.”

Here’s what interests me about this man. In Worth’s words, “[h]e seems almost allergic to ideological consistency, has long had readers on the left as well as the right, and sometimes changes his mind over the course of a single paragraph.” That could be a scathing criticism, but for me it’s the sign of someone with a fluid mind, a man who’s willing to see things from many angles.

“The world is not what we think it is,” Dreher writes. “It is so much weirder.” He writes that we need to disavow our scientific materialism and learn “to open our eyes to the reality of the world of spirit and how it interacts with matter.” That actually doesn’t sound crazy to me. I don’t think we should disavow scientific materialism, but we would probably benefit from acknowledging its limitations and opening to the many mysteries that are still unknowable.

But then he gets into demonic possession and fallen angels and conflating that with the gay and trans-rights movement, and he loses me.

As I got further into this article, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, in a poetic world, Dreher and I are on the same page. Worth writes, “He seems to see America as a hellscape…drugged and distracted by the false gods of the internet.”

In a carefully measured way, I agree with that last part. We are so many of us drugged (daily use of pot is up 15-fold from 1992, and the THC in it is up 300% from the stuff we spoked in the 70s).

And “distracted by false gods of the internet?” Don’t get me started. Teens, for example, average 8-9 hours online a day. This can cause hearing and vision damage as well as depression and musculoskeletal issues such as Occipital Neuralgia, Text Neck, iPosture, and text claw. Whether that’s Satan himself or just a giant corporation with an insatiable need for “eyeballs,” it’s not good. And many aspects of the internet fulfill the definition of “false gods.”

Dreher’s solution to all this is fleshed out in his book, The Benedict Option. Here, he lays out the reasons for a strategic withdrawal from mainstream society, so that communities of Christians can return to the 6th-century teachings of Saint Benedict (who responded to the fall of the Roman Empire by creating a monastic order). I get it. I certainly understand the desire to retreat and just ‘be with my people.’ But I’m not sure retreat into guarded, tight-knit, private, so-called ‘Christian’ societies is the answer. There are too many ominous possible outcomes.

And besides. Jesus hung out with everybody. He even palled around with tax collectors. And ladies of the night. Not sure he’d even be welcome in the Benedictine enclave.

Worth writes, “more than anyone else I know of, Dreher offers a full-fledged portrait of the cultural despair that haunts our era, a despair that has helped pave a road toward tyranny.” Yes, he’s put his finger on that pulse. It’s just frightening that he thinks that J. D. Vance is the answer to that despair, the future of our country.

Reading this essay certainly made me think. So thank you to the man who wrote it, and the man it’s about.

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Poetry: “Paris,” by Luisa Muradyan, from Rattle #90, Winter 2025

Luisa Muradyan was the 2025 Rattle Poetry Prize finalist, and you’ll see why below. The braiding of the idealized and the real so as to define what real love looks like in this idealized culture—this is her gift to us. Enjoy:

Sitting in the cafeteria at Costco, I break apart
my croissant slowly. In this rare moment
I am alone and imagine I am at a cafe
where the Eiffel Tower does the magical
thing that the Eiffel Tower always does
in movies about carefree love and wine
and fromage, where the characters might be
clumsy but in an endearing way and everyone
is hot in an objective way but I am
in my sweatpants and haven’t showered in
days and I am not there for perfume but
for the family-sized package of children’s Motrin
and you are back home ladling soup
and firing up the thermometer that blazes
red, which is an indication of desire and yes
there is a river of puke in the hallway that rivals
the canals and yes the snot on our toddler’s face
has crystallized like the rim of a crème brûlée
but I still want you to meet me at the Champs-Élysées
and tuck a flower into my hair despite the fact that it
has been in a ponytail for weeks. Let us ride
down this street together for just a little
while longer, and remark about how the air smells
like freshly baked bread and when I get home
we can open this box of croissants and pretend
that the hallway covered in crayons
is a new exhibition at the Louvre and the stack
of dishes resembles the Arc de Triomphe
because one day we will go to Paris and stand
inside of Notre Dame and be amazed at how
much a toy car that is left on a prayer bench
reminds us of home, our own cathedral
that we built brick by metaphorical
brick alongside our untrained artists who know
nothing of Monet but everything about the color of
the sunset on the Seine that in this light
looks exactly like the orange cold
medicine in this plastic cup
that you hold in your hand.

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** Every Wednesday and Saturday, I post my progress in this 1000-Day MFA—a Ray Bradbury-inspired project described here. I don’t email these posts, but they’re always available here (click on “1000-Day MFA” tab).

An evocative story about a young girl who feels herself safer in nature than with people. That’s not me, but a few pages in, I felt like it was. Like the author was describing something I recognized in myself, only I kept it very secret.

The girl lives with her grandmother in the countryside. They are poor. A young man arrives, and we learn that he is a bird hunter. He is charming, kind, friendly. He’s heard of a white heron in the area. Very much wants to find it. Offers them ten dollars (a wildly generous sum) for leading him to this bird.

Jewett places us inside the little girl’s heart, so desperate to please the man. She knows where the white heron is, she’s sure of it. One morning before the sun is up, she steals away to the massive pine tree where she suspects the heron hangs out. She climbs to the top, finds the beautiful bird.

Our heart sinks.

But in the end, although she doesn’t know why, she never lets on and the young man goes away disappointed. And we all heave a sigh of relief.

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Essay: “Skywoman Falling,” by Robin Wall Kimmerer (from Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants”

Kimmerer’s book opens with a chapter illustrating how different creation stories actually bring completely different worlds into being. We are first told the Skywoman Falling story, where a woman falls from a hole in the sky, tumbling down a column of light and clutching a bundle tightly in her hand.

A flock of geese rise up together from the water to break Skywoman’s fall. A turtle offers his back for a foothold. A muskrat gives his life to find a little mud for her to use to make the earth. She dances with gratitude for the animals’ gifts, and her dancing creates the world. Like any good guest, she brings a gift. The bundle in her hand. Fruits and seeds of all kinds of plants. Sunlight streams through the hole in the Skyworld and everything flourishes.

Kimmerer compares that creation myth and the people who live by it (the original peoples throughout the Great Lakes) to the one with the woman and the tree. “. . .for tasting the fruit, she was banished from the garden and the gates clanged shut behind her.” Kimmerer says, “One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.”

Urban sprawl, habitat loss, factory farms, toxic water—those come from the Adam and Eve myth, from God’s command that they should “subdue the earth.” Our creation stories tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them. But we can learn from and live by other stories. Kimmerer reminds us, “As Gary Nabhan has written, we can’t meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without ‘re-story-ation.”

And in this book, thankfully, she gives us those stories. What brings them into our live so effectively is that, as the title of the book promises, she braids together the three strands: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the vast teaching of plants.

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Poetry by res plumata:

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** Every Wednesday and Saturday, I post my progress in this 1000-Day MFA—a Ray Bradbury-inspired project described here. I don’t email these posts, but they’re always available here (click on “1000-Day MFA” tab).